The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess were both considered for the HD treatment on Wii U before Nintendo decided to go with Wind Waker, producer Eiji Aonuma has revealed.

Speaking with Wired, Aonuma said, “When we looked at creating a Zelda for Wii U, there were so many possibilities given the HD graphics. But rather than starting from zero, we actually ran a few tests.

“We tried converting other console games to Wii U. We actually did this with Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. And the result of that was, hmm, those are semi-realistic representations of the Zelda world so we weren’t really surprised with what we got. But with Wind Waker, when we converted that to HD we were really surprised at how great it looked.”

“We actually started thinking, maybe it was too soon to create that graphic style with the GameCube because of the limitations of the hardware. And we’re finding that we’re able to do what we wanted to do: The vision that we had then was being created thanks to the system specs and the HD graphics.

“It feels like we’re really able to create the complete Wind Waker experience on Wii U. In addition to the graphics, we’ve also got the GamePad and there’s lots of other pluses that we’re finding in converting to the Wii U system.”

Aonuma’s explanation make sense, given that Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess already looked impressive given the Wii’s hardware power, so bringing the GameCube’s Wind Waker into the HD age will make the leap appear more significant.

However, not everyone saw it from Aonuma’s point of view initially, “When I suggested moving forward with Wind Waker HD, internally there was actually a lot of pushback. The reason for that is, people were saying, ‘Oh, that Link. People didn’t like that Link.’ But in talking to our counterparts in the U.S., that wasn’t actually the case, people didn’t have that negative reaction maybe anymore to that younger Link.”

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